About 20 injuries, most of them to swimmers' shoulders and collarbones, occurred Tuesday and Wednesday when unusually powerful waves came crashing down on the beach, said Butch Arbin, captain of the Ocean City Beach Patrol.

Beachgoers have also reported unusually large tidepools taking up much of the beach.

I agree, it is a Frankenstein beach now. All pieced together but not quite right. Lowere Jersey shore or VA Beach are still good beaches except on a certain week for the latter unless you are in a high rise hunkered down just to spectate!

Both are common at this point in the summer when tropical storm activity sends a surge of churned water toward the coastline, Arbin said.

"Even if it's not a named storm, it just churns up the ocean. It pushes water in front of it," Arbin said. "What we're seeing right now is a direct result of the most recent tropical activity in the Atlantic."

Bertha's passage has raised water levels along the East Coast, Arbin said, making for deeper water over the protective sandbars a few dozen yards off of the beach. Waves that would break at the sandbars continue building strength as they move toward the beach instead.

"If you're standing there and you have a ton of water crashing down on you, in some cases it's going to propel you down into the sand," Arbin said. "It's like being rear-ended in a car wreck."

Lifeguards along the length of Ocean City pulled all swimmers out of the water at noon Wednesday to explain the dangers, and would again at other points in the day, he said.

The surge of water onto the beach meanwhile also created massive tidepools that covered much of the beach, mystifying many tourists.

Arbin said both the tidepools and the surf dangers would diminish over the next day or two as the ocean calms with Bertha's departure. The storm was no longer a tropical cyclone as of Wednesday morning and was about 300 miles south of Nova Scotia.

Hawaii braced for a one-two punch from a pair of major storms barreling toward the archipelago on Thursday, with Hurricane Iselle leading the way bringing high winds and heavy surf as Hurricane Julio gathered steam behind it, U.S. officials said.

The boardwalk and streets of Ocean City are crowded with restaurants, bars, mini golf courses, stores and ice cream parlors, each and every one tempting in its own way. So how to know which is best? The Baltimore Sun asked readers to weigh in, and hundreds did, choosing their favorites in 20 categories,...

Pluto's "heart" contains shifting glaciers of frozen nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide, and its atmosphere is both deeper and disappearing more rapidly than scientists predicted, New Horizons mission leaders said Friday.